Monday, November 26, 2012

Phase 1 Android development complete

Was a rather bumpy ride actually, not only was I a complete noob, not to mention the ongoing problems with my 1TB drive, but I've got no C programming skills, I don't know jack about Linux, and Android, on a Windows Mobile phone? The last part isn't a surprise but my oh my did I learn quite a bit from this.

My problems started when the source I am using, the only source on the net, was half baked. It was using code from Linux kernel 2.6.32 and 2.6.35. Now I, a complete noob in all things Linux, had some left over mentality from my Windows Mobile cooking days, which dealt with dll's for drivers and registry lines for the rest of the OS. So if say for WM, you wanted to cook an HTC program into a Samsung phone, one thing to keep in mind was dependancies, that is the files a .exe requires to run. It's not like that with Linux. In fact, if I had to sum up Linux kernels as short as possible, I would say a Linux kernel is made up of a whole bunch of text. I'm not kidding, we're not talking about dll's, exe's or large files, it's practically files with a lot of text in them that basically say "this is the power driver" and "it uses this much voltage" and so on. I was rather surprised by this, and the fact that it took me 2 months to get where I'm at now shows that that's a lot of text I had to read, and watching terminal compile my kernels was also important as it spews out errors and warnings which are critical to compiling a working kernel.

It's a fun process though, and, which is actually kind of easy, to be honest. I mean, during the Windows Mobile days, it was very hard to find drivers for a particular chipset, CPU and such, all I have to say is "HTC class action" and old WM'ers would know what I mean. In a way, this is what Android is about, open source, and it makes things quite easy to solve oneself should they require better video drivers, or more CPU customization, etc. I know things would have been a lot better if I learned C, and maybe it wouldn't have taken me 2 months if I wasn't having space problems, and heck, I'm still bitter about Ubuntu's usability, but at least I made progress.

While shunning some other projects. But now that I got the meat of the problems solved, it's back to Photoshop XD (as soon as I do something about this cold I have >__>)